Okay so about all these voting complaints. I have discussed this with Bluesteel and Mikal a bit, so I understand the eagerness to have the voting process changed.

After reading some of the votes on plenty of debates, I can see 100% where these complaints are coming from. For example, on the Mikal VS roylatham debate, I saw a lot of voting that I questioned. Some of the debaters that voted would provide great RFD"s, and push an arguments point for the side they thought won. Others would drop votes with shady RFD"s that showed they maybe barely skimmed the debate, and would drop 6 or 7 points to the side the voted for (regardless of how minor spelling/grammar, sources, or conduct violations were). Unfortunately voting tendencies can be pretty subjective. What is important to one person may not be equally important to another.

For example, I myself will usually only vote many of the other points if I think it made a considerable difference in the debate, and if it was an important enough factor to score it against someone. Whereas another person might vote a source point to someone for simply having more of them (without even reading the actual information in the sources). Sometimes people will dock people conduct because they seemed condescending, or aggressive. Sometimes people will dock people spelling and grammar because they made 2 more mistakes then their opponent, even though they still understood the sentence and statement.

To get everyone to fully read a debate with upwards of 8k characters in each argument, is asking a lot I think. I do it when I vote, but it is also the reason I don"t vote as often. I am not sure if forcing people to only vote argument points will entirely fix that problem. It will take out some of the strategy of awarding 7 points to a vote that only awarded 3 to the other side, but the nature of a semi-poor RFD will still exist.

There is still an existing problem, as you cannot always ask airmax to remove votes that are hard to determine whether or not they are legit or not. Some of you were here for all the drama with the removal of the drafterman"s vote, and know how slippery the line can be.

It is my opinion that the problem lies mainly with the voters, not the actual system. The change needs to occur within voting habits, not the system. Roy said that we need to teach voters how to vote, and set an example. I don"t think this conclusion is so impossible, only because I have seen voting tendencies increase here over the 5 years that I have known DDO. The fact that people are even willing to post lengthy RFD"s that pass the limit that was given to us in the RFD system, demonstrates that voting has increased since before when people only had to vote, and could do so anonymously. I think when members see issues being raised in the forums about improper voting, or are confronted about an improper vote they may have cast, the idea that voting should be taken more seriously slowly starts to take a communal change.

But because there are so many people that agree that this voting behavior is very annoying, I would like to propose a potential solution. I have mentioned this briefly in another thread and the idea seemed to be picking up a bit of support. What if I were to pitch an idea to juggle to add the option to allow the debater creating the challenge to pick what points the debate would be judged on? I think this solution would be better than forcing one side or the other. There are plenty of people that see necessity for the different categories, and there are plenty of others that don"t, but I feel this option best give serve the most amounts of people.

From my last conversation with Julia, she told me that she received feedback asking Juggle to put an option to limit the number of judges as a set option for voting standards. She went on to say that the change wouldn"t require a lot of re-work of the current system. I am wondering if my proposed change would be as easy, since we really are doing the same thing (just adding another option in the start a new debate page).

I want to gather some feedback on this idea before I suggest it to Julia. Is this a good idea or a bad idea? I can"t see any negatives with this potential update, but then again I am biased by my own idea.What say ye debate.org?

Just overall doesn't really fix the problem. I don't really think anyone has it right: it's not the system's fault (although I agree the system needs MAJOR improvements), and it's not entirely the voters fault (although better voters would be a great thing to have). It's rather a mix of the two: that a bad voting system is exacerbating the problems created by really low-quality votes. Fixing one isn't sufficient.

The first problem (the system) is an easy enough fix: just change the debate scoring to a simple up-down system. Problem solved. Changing the voters themselves is a much harder problem to solve. Personally I don't think it's solvable with the way that Juggle wants to take this site (more opinions/polls focused since it's drawing in most of the site traffic which is entirely fair they have to make a profit).

The only way we're going to fix the lack of quality RFDs is to get some more quality RFDs to get registered. We can either a) get current members who are capable of giving quality RFDs to vote more (which is kinda hard with time constraints and debates being the way that they are insofar as most debates are a grind to get through). But even this won't solve the problem entirely. The entire jist of it, and arguably the easiest way to fix the problem is to get some more high-caliber debaters in here: the more people we attract, the more people available to vote. The problem with this method is to attract better debaters we would need improvements to the debate section in general, and Juggle has, quite clearly, expressed that they would rather be working on updates for the polls and opinions section. So the changes that would be needed for the debate section to become nice enough to attract a lot of new, high caliber debaters just won't happen (because god knows how long the site has been bitching for a team debate setting and look at the progress).

tl;dr - Both the system and the voters are at fault. System is an easy fix. Voters aren't as easy, and probably not fixable.

Possible Solutions:1. Have each participant in the debate select a number of people (for example, 3). Only the selected people may vote on the debate. You don't even need to add new functionality to the site, you just need a moderator's approval. Each participant states, in an argument or the comments who is "allowed" to vote on that debate and the inform the moderator if anyone else votes and the moderator deletes the vote. Extra work for the moderator, but I'm sure many people would be willing to respect the wishes of the debate participants.

2. Rank voters. Right now treatment of votes is binary. It's accepted as valid, or rejected and deleted. Instead allow people to rank votes (say, 1 - 5). On the short term, you could simply have higher ranked votes count more. On the long term, you could tie the votes rankings to the voter. They'd have a vote ranking which would grant future votes more weight.

Personally, I think multiple categories and multiple point systems in a vote only lends itself to abuse. The more complex a system, the greater degree there are hidden flaws that can be exploited and it is harder to combat. Simpler is the way to go. There should be a single vote: which side won the debate?

That won't "fix" anything per se, but it will make finding and implementing solutions much easier.

There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

At 3/28/2014 2:10:37 PM, Ore_Ele wrote:There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

I think hiding scores makes it worse, especially if you do not adopt a smilar metric for voting

I had a debate where everyone was voting on a 3 scale metric and then people starting voting against me on a 6 scale metric. All were valid RFDS, but the issue was 2 6 point votes countered 4 2 point votes. I did not even have to mention this and people started to notice it and up the voting metric to 6 in response. This led to the debate blowing up obv, but that is in spite of the point. At least there is a way to counterbalance unfair votes like that. The voters have the option to try and even out the debate if someone is trying to push someone else to win

If you remove the votes from the public and it is still on a 7 scale system, people could be voting on entirely different metrics and you could end up with something like

Pro has 15 people who agree with himCon has 9 people who agree with him

Con wins by 1 point

I think removing it from public could work, but only if you scaled everyone on the same point system.

At 3/28/2014 2:10:37 PM, Ore_Ele wrote:There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

I think hiding scores makes it worse, especially if you do not adopt a smilar metric for voting

The scores would only be hidden from other voters, so they couldn't see that their side was down and vote strategically. The debaters would always be able to see it so they could report if necessary.

I had a debate where everyone was voting on a 3 scale metric and then people starting voting against me on a 6 scale metric. All were valid RFDS, but the issue was 2 6 point votes countered 4 2 point votes. I did not even have to mention this and people started to notice it and up the voting metric to 6 in response. This led to the debate blowing up obv, but that is in spite of the point. At least there is a way to counterbalance unfair votes like that. The voters have the option to try and even out the debate if someone is trying to push someone else to win

If you remove the votes from the public and it is still on a 7 scale system, people could be voting on entirely different metrics and you could end up with something like

Pro has 15 people who agree with himCon has 9 people who agree with him

Con wins by 1 point

I think removing it from public could work, but only if you scaled everyone on the same point system.

At 3/28/2014 2:10:37 PM, Ore_Ele wrote:There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

I think hiding scores makes it worse, especially if you do not adopt a smilar metric for voting

The scores would only be hidden from other voters, so they couldn't see that their side was down and vote strategically. The debaters would always be able to see it so they could report if necessary.

I had a debate where everyone was voting on a 3 scale metric and then people starting voting against me on a 6 scale metric. All were valid RFDS, but the issue was 2 6 point votes countered 4 2 point votes. I did not even have to mention this and people started to notice it and up the voting metric to 6 in response. This led to the debate blowing up obv, but that is in spite of the point. At least there is a way to counterbalance unfair votes like that. The voters have the option to try and even out the debate if someone is trying to push someone else to win

If you remove the votes from the public and it is still on a 7 scale system, people could be voting on entirely different metrics and you could end up with something like

Pro has 15 people who agree with himCon has 9 people who agree with him

Con wins by 1 point

I think removing it from public could work, but only if you scaled everyone on the same point system.

At 3/28/2014 2:10:37 PM, Ore_Ele wrote:There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

I think hiding scores makes it worse, especially if you do not adopt a smilar metric for voting

The scores would only be hidden from other voters, so they couldn't see that their side was down and vote strategically. The debaters would always be able to see it so they could report if necessary.

I had a debate where everyone was voting on a 3 scale metric and then people starting voting against me on a 6 scale metric. All were valid RFDS, but the issue was 2 6 point votes countered 4 2 point votes. I did not even have to mention this and people started to notice it and up the voting metric to 6 in response. This led to the debate blowing up obv, but that is in spite of the point. At least there is a way to counterbalance unfair votes like that. The voters have the option to try and even out the debate if someone is trying to push someone else to win

If you remove the votes from the public and it is still on a 7 scale system, people could be voting on entirely different metrics and you could end up with something like

Pro has 15 people who agree with himCon has 9 people who agree with him

Con wins by 1 point

I think removing it from public could work, but only if you scaled everyone on the same point system.

It was more of the last part of that.

That kind of falls to what I said earlier that it is best to recognize that those other ideas (like the hidden scores) are seperate from the Status Quo vs a new system and to not let them be a distraction of that concern.

At 3/28/2014 2:10:37 PM, Ore_Ele wrote:There are a number of things that can be done about citing that are independent of the voting system. Ranking RFD, hiding scores (from public, not from the debaters or admin) but showing RFD until the voting is over, voting guide improvements, and other options. But those can be built on top of either the current system, a win/loss system or any other system that we want to consider.

I believe it is important to recognize that because these are independent of the voting system, we should not let them be a distraction from a discussion about the system itself.

I think hiding scores makes it worse, especially if you do not adopt a smilar metric for voting

The scores would only be hidden from other voters, so they couldn't see that their side was down and vote strategically. The debaters would always be able to see it so they could report if necessary.

I had a debate where everyone was voting on a 3 scale metric and then people starting voting against me on a 6 scale metric. All were valid RFDS, but the issue was 2 6 point votes countered 4 2 point votes. I did not even have to mention this and people started to notice it and up the voting metric to 6 in response. This led to the debate blowing up obv, but that is in spite of the point. At least there is a way to counterbalance unfair votes like that. The voters have the option to try and even out the debate if someone is trying to push someone else to win

If you remove the votes from the public and it is still on a 7 scale system, people could be voting on entirely different metrics and you could end up with something like

Pro has 15 people who agree with himCon has 9 people who agree with him

Con wins by 1 point

I think removing it from public could work, but only if you scaled everyone on the same point system.

It was more of the last part of that.

That kind of falls to what I said earlier that it is best to recognize that those other ideas (like the hidden scores) are seperate from the Status Quo vs a new system and to not let them be a distraction of that concern.

The categories have nothing to do with the quality of the voting. Most debates are 'won' or 'lost' based on the 'made the most convincing argument' and when people are willing to put well known informal fallacies in their RFD; what system of points could possibly fix that?

LOL, yeah, it's pretty amazing how they think they can "reason" with you. - Sidewalker, speaking of advocates for sexual deviancy.

If there are two problems with the system, why wouldn't fixing one at least result in an improvement? The problem *is* a bad judging system that facilitates bad judges to award more points than other people do.

== The system ==

You can fix this with an "argument only" point, as a lot of people now seem to agree. You can't strategically vote if your vote automatically counts the same as everyone else's. You *can* leave a sh*tty RFD and possibly not even read the debate, but you can't leave these ridiculous 6-point votes that outweigh most other people's votes.

== The voters ==

There are two solutions, both of which would be nice. (1) Attract more high quality debters. They will "swamp" bad votes if enough really good judges vote. But even if we had our own site run by former debaters, attracting new consistent users is hard. (2) Even with more "good" judges, we'd still get bad RFD's. A stricter moderation system would solve this if it required more of an RFD.

Of all these problems, the only one that isn't solvable by DDO is "attracting more high quality debaters." Zaradi hit the nail on the head - Juggle isn't interested in these people; they prefer adding feature sets that attract idiots to come vote on polls.

In the short term, we can fix the voting system and add a stricter moderation policy. I've worked up a proposal for stricter moderation and sent it to airmax.

As to Juggle -- I just learned something new. You can't transfer exclusive ownership to a copyright without a signed writing. Therefore, Juggle's TOS does not grant them ownership of the copyright in your debates; at best, it grants them a non-exclusive license to use your content in various ways. You remain free to grant other sites a license to copy all your content over onto their site...

Do with that information what you will.

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into - Jonathan Swift (paraphrase)

At 3/28/2014 6:35:43 AM, Zaradi wrote:Just overall doesn't really fix the problem. I don't really think anyone has it right: it's not the system's fault (although I agree the system needs MAJOR improvements),and it's not entirely the voters fault (although better voters would be a great thing to have). It's rather a mix of the two: that a bad voting system is exacerbating the problems created by really low-quality votes. Fixing one isn't sufficient.

The first problem (the system) is an easy enough fix: just change the debate scoring to a simple up-down system.

Can you explain this better? If my understanding of what you are saying is correct, I can see a lot of problems here.

Problem solved. Changing the voters themselves is a much harder problem to solve. Personally I don't think it's solvable with the way that Juggle wants to take this site (more opinions/polls focused since it's drawing in most of the site traffic which is entirely fair they have to make a profit).

The only way we're going to fix the lack of quality RFDs is to get some more quality RFDs to get registered. We can either a) get current members who are capable of giving quality RFDs to vote more (which is kinda hard with time constraints and debates being the way that they are insofar as most debates are a grind to get through).

I have done so in the past, but not the level I would prefer. I am still thinking of new ways to entice people to vote more. I really think it just comes down to time and availability though, as you said.

But even this won't solve the problem entirely. The entire jist of it, and arguably the easiest way to fix the problem is to get some more high-caliber debaters in here: the more people we attract, the more people available to vote. The problem with this method is to attract better debaters we would need improvements to the debate section in general, and Juggle has, quite clearly, expressed that they would rather be working on updates for the polls and opinions section.

From my latest conversations with Julia, we have only been discussing updates for the debate section. So unless their representative has been lying to me, if and when updates do occur, I am inclined to believe they will be debate oriented.

At 3/28/2014 6:35:43 AM, Zaradi wrote:Just overall doesn't really fix the problem. I don't really think anyone has it right: it's not the system's fault (although I agree the system needs MAJOR improvements),and it's not entirely the voters fault (although better voters would be a great thing to have). It's rather a mix of the two: that a bad voting system is exacerbating the problems created by really low-quality votes. Fixing one isn't sufficient.

The first problem (the system) is an easy enough fix: just change the debate scoring to a simple up-down system.

Can you explain this better? If my understanding of what you are saying is correct, I can see a lot of problems here.

All of the problems that the system has are already being had with the way the system is right now. None of which we can solve without Juggle investing time to revamp the debate section to be a lot more awesome.

Problem solved. Changing the voters themselves is a much harder problem to solve. Personally I don't think it's solvable with the way that Juggle wants to take this site (more opinions/polls focused since it's drawing in most of the site traffic which is entirely fair they have to make a profit).

The only way we're going to fix the lack of quality RFDs is to get some more quality RFDs to get registered. We can either a) get current members who are capable of giving quality RFDs to vote more (which is kinda hard with time constraints and debates being the way that they are insofar as most debates are a grind to get through).

I have done so in the past, but not the level I would prefer. I am still thinking of new ways to entice people to vote more. I really think it just comes down to time and availability though, as you said.

But even this won't solve the problem entirely. The entire jist of it, and arguably the easiest way to fix the problem is to get some more high-caliber debaters in here: the more people we attract, the more people available to vote. The problem with this method is to attract better debaters we would need improvements to the debate section in general, and Juggle has, quite clearly, expressed that they would rather be working on updates for the polls and opinions section.

From my latest conversations with Julia, we have only been discussing updates for the debate section. So unless their representative has been lying to me, if and when updates do occur, I am inclined to believe they will be debate oriented.

Even though they've openly admitted they're primarily focused on the opinions and polls section because it brings in most of their traffic?

What needs to be considered is how any change is going to affect good voting, poor voting, and malicious voting.

1) Malicious Voting

Voting that is either intended to harm a particular member, or a particular position/ideology (voting for a Liberal position to make sure that position wins, rather than who actually did best in the debate).

There are two ways to affect this, making it harder to get away with it and making it less effective at causing the desired effect.

a) Making it harder to get away with.

This should be clear. How does change X make it harder (or negatively, easier) for people to throw off debates with harmful votes. The biggest change we've had focusing on this cause was removing anonymous voting and requiring RFDs. While they do not fully stop the issue (no idea will 100% stop it, they do make it harder to get away with it).

b) Making it less effective.

By making it less effective, you remove some of the purpose and incentive for doing it. After all, decisions are made on a Risk/Reward structure, the 1-a focuses on maximizing the Risk, while this is for minimizing the reward.

2) Poor voting

This can be viewed as voting that is either lazy or uneducated/unguided. These votes are sometimes the hardest to fix, because many of them will simply not vote, rather than take the effort to become good voters.

a) Laziness

It is important that any change does not cause too much work for voters. This causes members to not vote at all, rather than go through the time to fulfill the voting requirements. The RFDs had a major effect on this.

b) Unguided

A lot of the time, poor voting can be attributed to new members not being familiar with proper voting etiquette, being familiar with a different site that does things a different way, or some other reason for them just not being aware of what they are supposed to do (we often see this with issues of poor RFDs). Any suggested changes should consider if they help guide or removing any guides for voters as well as (and this ties back to the laziness aspect) how difficult those guides are to use. A guide that is extremely long and tiresome to get through, or hard to find is just going to be skipped.

3) Good voting

This is something that little so far has been focused on in DDO, apart from RFDs and individual members trying to step it up. We all know what it is. It is a vote that takes into consideration only what has been presented within the debate. Not any outside factors and especially not any personal feelings on the topic at hand. A good vote is one which should accurately describe the outcome or result of the debate, free from bias.

Any change should be looked to see if it has an effect on creating or harming the incentive to do this.

At 3/28/2014 11:30:59 PM, TUF wrote:I haven't gotten any positive feedback on this idea yet. Considering throwing the issue out the window.

It's not a lack of positive feedback, it's the too many cooks in the kitchen issue. My sense of the issue is that 80% of the people who weigh in on this issue seem ready for a change to the voting system. A lot of reaction to an "argument-only" system have been positive. BUT there's so many different threads out there and so many different proposals getting thrown around that progress on this is stalling.

We need to solidify all the proposals, or pair them down to a few, and then have *one* official thread and *one* official poll to decide the issue. Otherwise, you get ennui about "not another voting system thread."

You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into - Jonathan Swift (paraphrase)

At 3/28/2014 11:30:59 PM, TUF wrote:I haven't gotten any positive feedback on this idea yet. Considering throwing the issue out the window.

It's not a lack of positive feedback, it's the too many cooks in the kitchen issue.

Agreed.

My sense of the issue is that 80% of the people who weigh in on this issue seem ready for a change to the voting system. A lot of reaction to an "argument-only" system have been positive. BUT there's so many different threads out there and so many different proposals getting thrown around that progress on this is stalling.

We need to solidify all the proposals, or pair them down to a few, and then have *one* official thread and *one* official poll to decide the issue. Otherwise, you get ennui about "not another voting system thread."

Next time you are on google hangouts, I would like to have an in length discussion with you about the voting process, and get your feedback on some of my thoughts and ideals about the voting issues lately. I am generally limited to my cell phone, so long responses are a pain in the arse, but I would like to pick your brain on some different potential solutions here. I have been getting a few different ideas messaged to me, and see new forum topics with different ideas. I am starting to wonder if the system is at all at fault here, or if we could fix the entire thing by pushing efforts for better voting. I talked to Mikal about this before on hangouts, and he agrees different methods to increase quality in RFD's needs to happen, but I think I heard one suggestion that just might do that.